My stint with photo manipulation

I had a good chance of working up on manipulating an image or rather a photograph, with the help of a good friend. Here is one that I have manipulated to the greatest extent, pixel wise, curves, colors, levels..... You name it.

Original and the manipulated images

Though I have done some image manipulation to experiment (Touchups), I was and am not very much into it, personally I don’t like to use image manipulation on my photographs, but then its ones personal choice.
Some of such touched up ones are.........

But the original ones always hold up..........

The notion of keeping a photograph genuine and authentic has never left me.
An aversion to image manipulation always followed. Fun and Curiosity of how things can be done, is making me learn the image manipulation techniques.

Why the need to manipulate images when one want to show the real photograph!